2020: Year in Review on Volleybox
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2020: Year in Review on Volleybox

Volleybox 2020-12-31 • 12679 views • 6
 

Despite the COVID pandemic and lack of volleyball matches from March to September, it was the best year in 13 years history of the project. This year we have made the most progress so far. In my opinion there are three pillars of this success: your great performance, new features on the website and organic traffic from Google.

Let’s go through the details.

Famous men players who joined Volleybox in 2020:

Famous women players who joined Volleybox in 2020:

Famous staff members who joined Volleybox in 2020:

2020 statistics

1,086,198 internet users visited Volleybox in 2020. There was 3,075,964 visits on Volleybox this year. All pages was viewed 16,630,607 times in 2020.

5026 users registered on Volleybox this year. 6433 of registered users logged this year to the platform. You added 2704 movies, 278 news, 71 links and 1947 posts, 36175 profiles, 172695 relations between profiles, 26904 matches, 66117 predictions for matches, 6806 transfers, 3786 roster photos this year.

1525 professional volleyball players, staff and team members joined Volleybox this year, 379 of them defined their financial expectations.

More statistics you can find under this link.

How was 2020 comparing to the others?

TOP10 most visited pages on Volleybox in 2020

 PagePage viewsPercent of all views
1.Transfers 2020/211,919,97911.55%
2.Homepage988,1935.94%
3.Transfers 2019/20237,9411.43%
4.Players database165,5241.00%
5.Players ranking152,8530.92%
6.Players looking for a job140,7070.85%
7.Landing page108,5790.65%
8.Best players in 2020 ranking69,9540.42%
9.Chat (replace currently with microblog)65,2410.39%
10.Clubs database63,3540.38%

New features added in 2020

Which features was implemented in different websites areas this year?

Database area

  1. Displaying exact player’s contract dates
  2. Extending database with staff members
  3. Staff members looking for a job page
  4. Coaches ranking page
  5. Possibility of adding a bankruptcy year of the volleyball club
  6. Teammates tab in the players and staff members profiles
  7. COVID-19 cases page
  8. Adding team roster photos
  9. Adding match reports
  10. Mechanism for reporting incorrect family relations

Volleyball agencies area

  1. Volleyball agency creator
  2. Adding clients, employees, partners on agencies profiles (example)
  3. Agencies database
  4. Reporting incorrect agencies assigned to the players
  5. Adding opinions about volleyball agencies
  6. Filtering clients in agencies profiles after clicking on flags
  7. Adding exact contract dates of players by their agents

Social area

  1. Adding volleyball experience by users
  2. Choosing favorite items among liked before (example)
  3. Microblogging
  4. Displaying popup: who is your favorite player
  5. Advanced editor while sending private messages to the users
  6. Profile views week statistics

Job market area

  1. Possibility of hiding club name during adding job offer.
  2. Adding financial expectations by volleyball players and staff members

Prediction games area

  1. Sending mail to the users who participated on the previous edition of the prediction game if new edition started
  2. New design of match predictions

UI improvements

  1. Displaying default avatars for different types of users
  2. New homepage layout
  3. New design of website navigation
  4. Changing way of displaying online users
  5. Adding breadcrumb lists
  6. New design of forum threads
  7. Full width profile wallpapers
  8. Vector illustrations made by Ricard

UX improvements

  1. Simplification of registration form
  2. Displaying current club of player in different places
  3. Notifications on menu about new topics and unread posts on forum
  4. Sending push notifications on the smartphones
  5. Application shortcut on the home screen of smartphones
  6. Animated page loaders
  7. Displaying information about being logged out
  8. Using hashtags in movies/news descriptions instead of separate field for tags

Authors of the website success in 2020

  • @slintyen – you provided me a lot of great ideas, a lot of them I can call “golden shots”, things which needed few lines of code, but which had great impact on the website. I really appreciate that you know how long does it take to implement new features on internet websites. Some users report a bug/suggestion and expect it to be ready tomorrow – you are not among them and I really thank you for that. Thanks for your backstage work that no one even knows about.
  • @Sherlock – thank you for helping me explaining the functionality of the website to users, for drawing my attention to things that need improvement, for thousands of hours spent on the website. I'm sure that you want the best for the project, that you feel like its co-creator. Thanks for the huge amount of data you added to the database, for giving me an extra motivation to work.
  • @Dorien – thanks for the quiet, maybe unnoticeable work you are doing. You have added 5960 matches (22% of all matches in 2020) and 604 match reports (16%) to the database in 2020. Talking to people from the volleyball community, I know the match reports are very useful and have good reviews. I consider this a milestone for the project. Thank you Dorien!
  • @pedeshtrian – you made Beach Volleybox worth visiting. Thanks for quick reaction in case of problems, for the substantive method of reporting bugs. It's fun working with you!
  • @KrzysztofKolodziej – thanks for the enthusiasm that radiates from you, you have motivated me many times to create something new here. Many functionalities are due to our long meetings, you helped me prioritise Volleybox backlog. I haven’t met another person so fascinated by this project yet.
  • @KamilSoloducha – thanks for a serious approach to the project, for drawing attention to legal problems, for your brilliant ideas. Hope to hear you again.
  • @jais – thanks for the substantive comments you add here. I wish the Volleybox was a place where many people like you would share their valuable thoughts.
  • @franzvinci01 – thanks for a lot of information added to the database, for the suggestions from years ago that I managed to implement this year. Adding clubs bankruptcy year, roster photos, numbers on the t-shirts and adding staff members to the roster was your ideas ?
  • @VitaliiLatysh – thank you for the very professional way of reporting bugs and suggestions on the website. I'm not always a supporter of your ideas, but every suggestion shows that someone may think differently, I try to take that into account. Many of your suggestions have been implemented, and you have often motivated me to implement something finally.
  • @sitenoise – thank you for your efforts to improve Volleybox code, for reporting issues
  • @Saliveros – thank you for completing Greek and Cypriot database
  • @Worldofvolley, @VolleyballKings, @top_volleyball, @MilanHomayoun, @VolleyballExplained - thanks for adding valuable content to the home page
  • @WojciechKulak – thanks for moderating the waiting room and social media profiles.
  • @ErykBierza – thank you for finding functional and technical problems while testing a website
  • @Fran – you probably won't read it, but I would like to thank you for creating almost half of the Volleybox database. I keep my fingers crossed for you to straighten things out in your private life and perhaps one day come back to us. I fully support your decision and wish you all the best.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Volleybox

I was once asked if COVID pandemic reflects negatively or positively on a website traffic.
I notice a correlation between played volleyball matches and the number of views of profiles of clubs or players who play in a given match. The more games played, the more profiles are visited. On the other hand because of pandemic people had more free time which they were spending in front of their computers/smartphones. Ultimately, taking both factors into account, the pandemic had a negative impact on the website. I predict activity here will be even greater once the pandemic is over and everything returns to normal.

What problems does Volleybox face?

  1. Users of the website are not willing to share their opinion
    Every day 6000 unique users are visiting Volleybox, but only ~ 120 are logging into the platform and ~ 20 are sharing their opinion.
    I'm still wondering what's the reason, maybe that's the language problem, maybe they would share their opinion but in their native language. What's your opinion about that?
  2. New features are not communicated properly to the users
    A lot of you don't know about all Volleybox features
  3. Insufficient development team
    1 person is responsible for UI, UX, implementation, testing, SEO, promotion
  4. No source of income, no investor
  5. No marketing specialist
  6. Out of 1 million internet users who visited the website in 2020, one donated the website, thank you @JP ?
  7. Volleybox gadgets sale ended in a fiasco

What were the greatest Volleybox successes in 2020?

The biggest success of the website in 2020 is the progress we made. You can compare how Volleybox was changed in one year time with other volleyball websites.

Currently Volleybox is on the 8th place among the most popular volleyball websites in the world.

Goals for 2021

Out of the many areas in which the website is developing, Volleybox will focus on the social aspect this year. I will try to motivate users to share their insights, their knowledge and point of view for different matters. The goal is to restore Volleybox as active as it was in 2011. I sincerely believe it is possible.

In 2021 we will try to engage you in defining priority for the different tasks. Our backlog is really huge and implementation of the all tasks with current team resources will take at least two years, so defining a priorities is a key to the success. I will try to get your feedback before implementing some new features. I truly believe in the strength of your suggestions. The idea is creating online dashboard available for all users where they will be able to vote what should be implemented first, where they have an influence how the website is working.

In 2020 I was asking regularly two persons from the volleyball community how important is some task in their opinion. Some of the tasks wasn’t worth to implemented. In last year I tried to put emphasis on UX research instead of code implementation. I will continue this way of work in the next year.

Volleybox development direction

The main goal of Volleybox is to create a place that gathers the entire volleyball community, where people want to communicate with each other, share information, their suggestions and observations, celebrate the legends of this sport and motivate players for being better.

I want Volleybox to be known for helping different volleyball people: fans, players, coaches, statisticians, team managers, team presidents and agents.

Volleybox is trying to follow Google’s route, we are providing all of the features for free, for everyone, no registration is required.

Thank you all,
Krzysztof Galanek

#Volleyboxnet #YearinReview #Volleyboxnetusers 

6 comments

Happy With VolleyballTW 106 8
3 years ago
+1

I miss this post. Good significient achievement in 2020. Hope more volleyball lovers will interact with each other with VolleyBox.

bpeter0228HU 9 5
3 years ago
+7

Like @Sherlock  wrote, it is the wikipedia of volleyball with tons of significant information. Almost every professional team and player has profile in volleybox and it's very useful for volleyball fans. I hope more and more players, teams and agents will find and use this site because it has potential.
Thank you for your work!

jaisSI 205 8
3 years ago
+3

Let's everybody just comment, debate, talk about volleyball, it's such an interesting sport! I think 2021 will be a good one considering the comment section ;)

Btw, great work, this page is one of the best things for the internet volleyball community!

Wish you all a very successful and happy new year! :D

DorienBE 61 5
3 years ago
+7

Congratulations to everyone for the hard work and contributions you make to the website. Thanks to you we find much more info about players, teams and competitions! 

I would like to see more interaction between users about matches that have been played, who their favorite / best player was during the match, ... Hopefully we can increase the statistics ‘added comments’ in 2021!

J. P.NL 139 3
3 years ago
+6

All the statistics looked great to me till I saw the comments. Damn what happened. I didn't know this site back in 2011, so I haven't got a clue as to why volleyball was so discussed so much here back then in comparison to now. I was a bit young back then haha.
I'll try my best to comment more on things so maybe others will feel motivated to do so too. After all thats one of the few things I can do to support this site. I like it a lot.
Lets make the Volleybox comment section great again!

S…k 717 16
3 years ago
+7

Congratulations for the huge work. I don't know anything about coding, implementations, UI, UX but I know volleyball and Volleybox is so complete. It is the “Wikipedia of volleyball”, every information can be found here.
I would also like to see everyone sharing their opinions for example under videos or in the transfers section. I don't know why it happens so few. I had great time talking with some people who will recognize them about Italian championships and transfers.

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